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Rock star quits UK over hunting ban

THE rock musician Roger Waters, who fronted the reformed Pink Floyd at this summer’s Live 8 concert, has become the first celebrity to leave Britain in protest at the ban on hunting.

He has gone to live in America “in disgust” at what he says is an unfair attack by Tony Blair’s government on Britain’s countryside community.

Waters never swapped Pink Floyd for hunting pinks but he is a keen shooting and fishing man. He supported the Countryside Alliance’s rearguard action against the ban with a benefit concert at the Albert Hall.

He has now packed his shooting sticks and fishing rods and moved to the Hamptons, the millionaires’ playground in New York state.

Waters, who unveils his new work, Ca Ira, an opera about the French revolution, in Rome in November, said last week: “To slap down a perfectly gentle, fair-minded and honest yeoman-like minority in that way was